How can civilian spacecraft be so heavily armed in most sci-fi settings?

See that was my problem. I never had much of a desire to revisit Season 1. So I forgot about the raider mother ship.

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Privately owned, armed, tanks.

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Of course, but people colonising had reasons to be carrying at least some weaponry for food and protection from animals (even scavenging) and I’d be surprised if that was not the primary reason you would be armed. Like you may be passing through areas where the genocide and disease had already cleared the land of its legitimate inhabitants but still carry a weapon. Space not so much

It’s my fave Sf movie in years. more stuff should be that good, dammit.

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And there’s the rub. How much inventory space for food and fuel would be allocated to civilian spaceships if there’s no “wild game” to be had? I mean, the whole idea of civilian spaceships really falls apart when you start to think of logistics. It’s a serious issue, even for a terrestrial satellite laboratory.

https://blogs.nasa.gov/spacestation/2018/04/30/what-does-it-take-to-keep-the-station-stocked-with-supplies/

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From this side of the atlantic, banning sale, transport and possession of weapons of war do not sound like a fascist thing.

Organized groups using weapons of war to threaten and harm people who are not into their worldview, OTH, that’s def a thing fascists are into.

Myth in the sense of fallacy.

Myth in the sense of ‘traditional’ story.
Star Wars is an amalgamation which feeds from very deep roots, which make it so relatable outside the US. Heroes journey, and so on.

The “the baddies want to take your gun” is a specific fallacy in the US. Not a mythical story in a traditional sense. Just a story some people make up because they want their word view unchallenged.

Sometimes I feel like the same is true for the US. :wink:

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Sure they need food. Pew pew guns on the outside of a spaceship are not going to be useful for that so it’s not relevant to why space opera civilian ships have them.

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But it is.

Science fiction enthusiasts may rant about “the rules”, but at its core, it’s still fantasy. Apply too much reality, and it doesn’t work smoothly to interest the most amount of readers it can attract from the general public.
I certainly wouldn’t care to read a book or watch a movie about crew members going about a fairly normal day, where nothing broke and nothing eventful happened.

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Space whales?

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I saw that! Ian is so lucky. Also, brilliant ploy to convince marketing to buy you a tank for marketing a game about tanks.

I wasn’t sure how they got the main gun to work, I thought those has to be demilled? But they said it was smoother bore, so maybe that is why. Or maybe it is a Destructive Device and you can get one with the right paper work.

At any rate, super fun to see how it works.

“Got any more of them 5th editions?”

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I don’t think that’s necessarily a fair comparison. Modern space stations need to be restocked from the planet. Everything has to be shot into orbit, from every single part of the ship/station itself to the food and other supplies.

That means space and weight are at an incredible premium. The same isn’t true in most sci-fi. Spaceships are built in orbit, they have no size restrictions. We have to assume that they use some sort of incredibly energetic fuel (that’s just part of the suspension of disbelief as otherwise they wouldn’t really work in the first place), so weight isn’t really a limiting factor either. That means that we can compare them with modern oceangoing ships more than anything. A nuclear submarine, which is probably the closest analogue to a space ship – because it also represents a closed system that doesn’t interact with other ships at all if possible and that equally has a surplus of energy – can stay submerged for c. 90 days in normal operation and 4-5 months if necessary. And of course a spaceship would have a much tinier crew and could be arbitrarily bigger, especially if it is a cargo ship.

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By “so is Star Wars (an American myth)” I meant it was an American movie written by an American so we shouldn’t be surprised if it reflects an American view of fascism, whether it’s accurate or not. We actually see the Empire collecting the weapons of a subjugated population in a recent episode of The Bad Batch; textually it is part of the universe.

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I think it’s your usage of the word “myth” that people find problematic, I know I do. It’s an American story based on a theory of myth (which is pretty fascist and ultimately based on Stalinist structural anthropology as far as I’m concerned) which Lucas for from Campbell.

It incorporates motifs from legends about America (open frontier, plucky individualists, cowboys) while not critiquing any of it. Legend and myth are different things, a modern screenplay is not really a myth.

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If you’re gonna have fanciful stuff, then why are guns off limits? That seems rather arbitrary.

I’m not saying guns are off limits. On the contrary, even before I read the article above and had only seen the title my mind immediately went to the armed merchantmen of the 16th to 18th centuries.

I was only addressing your point about supplies being a limiting factor to civilian spaceflight in a science fiction setting.

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Marvel Studios GIF by Disney+

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And I’d argue we have to suspend our disbelief at some point because if we don’t, if we expect everything in science fiction to be entirely plausible according to our current understanding of the world, then we could only talk about stories using current technology.

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Keep Talking Idris Elba GIF

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